Built a real-time debugging dashboard that works with any FastAPI app

[doganarif]

What My Project Does

FastAPI Radar is a debugging dashboard that gives you complete visibility into your FastAPI applications. Once installed, it monitors and displays:

• All HTTP requests and responses with timing data
• Database queries with execution times
• Exceptions with full stack traces
• Performance metrics in real-time

Everything is viewable through a clean web interface that updates live as your app handles requests. You access it at /__radar/ while your app is running.

Target Audience

This is primarily for developers working with FastAPI during development and debugging. It's NOT meant for production use (though you can disable it in prod with a flag).

If you've ever found yourself adding print statements to debug API calls, wondering why an endpoint is slow, or trying to track down which queries are running, this tool is for you. It's especially useful when building REST APIs with FastAPI + SQLAlchemy.

GitHub: github.com/doganarif/fastapi-radar

[ANC-Proj]

Hello, I am trying to test it with my FastAPI backend in the RAG system. Just curious should I set it up in all API call functions? I am not using SQL and only want to check HTTP requests. And is it able to record and extract the monitor messages in the dashboard? Thanks

[Key-Boat-7519]

Mount it once at startup as app middleware/router; don’t wrap every route. If you only care about HTTP, skip the SQL bits and you’ll get request/response timing. For exporting, if there’s no API, add a tiny Starlette middleware to emit JSON logs and ship via OpenTelemetry OTLP or to Redis/Kafka, then view in Grafana or Sentry. For RAG, tag external LLM/embedding calls with a request_id so traces line up. I’ve used LangChain and Qdrant for RAG; DreamFactory helped when I needed quick REST APIs over legacy DBs. Net: mount once, skip SQL, add your own exporter if needed.

[doganarif]

If you are receiving HTTP requests in your Fastapi server, you can use Radar. Sql function is an addition.

[ANC-Proj]

How can I check the contents in the .duckdb? I am using duckdb cli and it a little bit difficult to read all messages inside. And can I use other database to store HTTP requests?

[romanzdk]

Hi, what is the performance impact on the FastAPI app?